<p>This thread is five years old. TR, couldn’t he have a PhD? Such people use the Dr title.</p>
<p><<who has="" time="" for="" this!!!="">></who></p>
<p>Someone who has time to find and resurrect a four year old thread?</p>
<p>My goodness, I have a PhD in psychology. I hardly ever call myself a Dr. Lots of people consider that we are “not real Drs” and it is pretentious to use the title. My colleges use my title when they’re asking for money. I use it when I’m signing on to online petitions. I was in school for 10+ years and worked hard, but I would never rank my PhD over an MD.</p>
<p>What’s the order for an academic procession? Isn’t it true that the ‘highest’ degree enters first/leads the procession. If participants were dressed in regalia in accordance with their highest degree, what would be the order?
a JD, an MD, a PsyD, an EdD, a PhD</p>
<p>The president of my son’s college has an MD, a PHD and an MBA. He’d probably go first.</p>
<p>I had an attorney for a prof and he insisted the he he called, Dr. … I guess he felt that he would sound “below” the PhD profs if he we just called him, Mr…</p>
<p>I never realized there was any kind of hierarchy. Hmm</p>
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<p>What about fields where some doctoral programs require disseration and some others don’t, like education? Some reputable Ed.D programs in the '60s only require 75 graduate credits and a short practicum while others in the same period required a dissertation. </p>
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<p>In the case of law schools, the first-professional degree wasn’t a masters degree. It was actually a second bachelors in law a.k.a. LL.B. The modern JD is basically a post 50’s/60’s LL.B with a fancier sounding title.<br>
From what I’ve heard from older attorneys who received LL.Bs as their first-professional degree to become practicing attorneys, the time to completion and curriculum hasn’t changed very much from their day. </p>
<p>Incidentally, in many other countries in Europe and Asia, law is an undergraduate degree and receiving an LL.B or its equivalent is the first-professional degree needed to become a practicing attorney to start one’s career. </p>
<p>Some countries like Japan and Australia, however, are starting/thinking about moving over to the American model of making the LL.B/JD a post-undergrad degree.</p>
<p>One of my nieces is doing an MD-Phd so she’ll have both bases covered. It will be safe to call her Doctor.</p>
<p>Susan4–my PhD program only accepted 8 students my year. These are fully funded positions. I’m still surprised I was accepted so I’m not boasting. This is how Universities train their next generation of profs/researchers. I’m really grateful I got the position and the funding. Then they get you assistantships to help the profs, mentor the Masters students and earn a little more.</p>
<p>BCEagle–a Dr, no doubt!</p>
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<p>It is pretty hard to fail, and rare to drop out, of an MD (or JD).</p>
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In the United States, a person with an M.D. degree is always called a doctor. In my opinion, it is silly semantics to argue about whether an M.D. is a “doctorate,” and it reflects (also in my opinion) a self-esteem problem experienced by Ph.Ds when some people say they aren’t “real doctors” because they aren’t M.D.s.</p>
<p>The law degrees are interesting. I have a J.D. (juris doctor), and I went back for another year later to get an LL.M. (Master of Laws). So what exactly do I have? Who cares?</p>
<p>THis discussion reminded me of this article, “When the Nurse Wants to Be Called Doctor”
<a href=“With More Doctorates in Health Care, a Fight Over a Title - The New York Times”>With More Doctorates in Health Care, a Fight Over a Title - The New York Times;
<p>And the old New Yorker cartoon showing a maitre d’hotel speaking by telephone to a would-be diner, saying: ‘‘Certainly. A party of four at seven-thirty in the name of Dr. Jennings. May I ask whether that is an actual medical degree or merely a Ph.D.?’’</p>
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<p>That law educational path is the same many foreign lawyers pursue to gain a specialization or otherwise advance in their profession. Only difference is that their first degree is an LL.B(Bachelor of Laws) rather than a JD. </p>
<p>Moreover, the JD here in the states was dubbed an LL.B until sometime in the 50s/60’s when law schools/lawyers felt the need for a fancier sounding title for what was essentially the same degree.</p>
<p>cobrat, I know all that–my point is that I don’t demand to be called “doctor” or “master” or anything like that. Those who do are silly.</p>
<p>Indeed, I was taught that it’s crass to sign your name with “Esquire,” although you should address other lawyers with that honorific in letters.</p>
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<p>I think the history is more complicated than that. The very first university degrees in any field were doctorates in law, the only field of study offered at the University of Bologna in the 11th century. Other universities offering doctoral degrees in law sprang up in medieval Europe, and European universities only gradually expanded to offer doctoral degrees in other fields. The purely academic and theoretical study of law is deeply engrained in the continental European tradition, and many European universities continue to offer Ph.D.s in law. Over time, however, many European universities also came to offer undergraduate degrees in law, and it’s at that level that much of the professional training for lawyers takes place in Europe.</p>
<p>The common law tradition in England was different; except at Oxford and Cambridge where canon law and legal philosophy were taught as academic subjects, law was taught as a practical trade, essentially through apprenticeships, private tutoring, and self-instruction. That common law tradition carried over to North America. There were a few attempts to bootstrap it into a legitimate field of academic inquiry, but those didn’t really take hold until Christopher Columbus Langdell revamped the law curriculum at Harvard in the late 19th Century. It was Langdell who first proposed the Juris Doctor degree and insisted on the “scientific” study of law exclusively at the graduate level, with a degree on a par with doctoral degrees in theology (D.Div.), medicine (M.D.), and arts and sciences (the Ph.D.), and also as the equivalent of doctorates in law at the European universities. But the J.D. degree was quickly adopted at many other law schools that emphasized more practical training, and in reaction, Harvard, Yale and Columbia, among others, declined to adopt what they regarded as a diluted brand; they stuck with the LL.B. (Bachelor of Laws), notwithstanding its anomalous status since a “bachelors” degree is normally a first post-secondary degree, while the LL.B. was intended for those who had already acquired a bachelors degree in some other field. Under pressure from these market leaders, most law schools abandoned the J.D. and re-adopted the LL.B. by the 1930s. Then in the 1960s the law schools reversed course again, and dropped the LL.B. in favor of the J.D., with Yale, the last holdout, finally coming around in 1971.</p>
<p>So it’s not quite as simple as a Bachelor’s degree being rebranded. Law degrees in the U.S. have long had an ambiguous status, not exactly Bachelor’s degrees, nor exactly Masters either, since masters programs are typically only a year or two in length. Holders of Ph.D.s generally don’t see the J.D. as the equivalent of the Ph.D., and they’ve apparently persuaded the U.S. Department of Education of that; but the American Bar Association insists the J.D. is the equivalent of a Ph.D. in terms of qualifying its holder to teach at the university level. </p>
<p>FWIW, holders of the J.D. degree are entitled to wear standard doctoral academic regalia (caps and gowns), distinguished by three stripes on each sleeve of the gown, full ball sleeves, doctoral cape, and the option to wear a tam instead of a mortarboard–same as the holder of a D.Div, M.D., or Ph.D. So at least in that symbolic sense, the degrees are deemed to be equivalent.</p>
<p>Yes, but in university graduations, the Ph.D.s are always graduated last, after the BA/BSs, the MA/MSs, the JDs and the MDs. They are indeed the highest rank in the academy.</p>